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Review of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies†

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Review of Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies† Journal of South Pacific Law (2008) 12(2) REVIEW OF FOUNDATIONS OF HUMAN SOCIALITY: ECONOMIC EXPERIMENTS AND ETHNOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE FROM FIFTEEN SMALL-SCALE SOCIETIES† ∗ ANITA JOWITT This book is not written by lawyers or written with legal policy development in mind. Instead it is a collection of papers written primarily by anthropologists. However, the book does help to shed light on the relationship between social norms, cooperative behaviour and the use of law, and is methodologically interesting. It is therefore worth being brought to the attention of a wider audience. As this is not a legal text, this review will not provide a detailed description of each chapter. Instead, the review begins by describing the background to the project which led to the production of the book. It then turns to the methodology used, before turning to some of the key findings from the project. Finally, the significance of this research for deepening our understanding of legal decision making and the interaction of Pacific people with each other and with law is discussed. These papers were produced as phase one of the ‘The Roots of Human Sociality: An Ethno-Experimental Exploration of the Foundations of Economic Norms’ project.1 This project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation’s Norms and Preferences Research Network,2 aims to examine the extent to which people from different cultures around the world adhere to rational self interest or selfishness in their behaviour. Part of the agenda of the research is a reaction to the economic assumption that when people act their preference is to maximise gains for themselves. However, both “common sense”, based upon personal reflections of one’s own behaviour, and research in a variety of fields suggest that people are not so self-regarding in all of their actions. In order to explore people’s preferences, the Norms and Preferences Research Network favours experimental economics, a methodology which has largely involved using undergraduate university students as subjects to play economic games. In these games, subjects are given money and asked to make various decisions which will affect how much they and their game partners receive. Upon hearing of this body of experimental economics research, a graduate student duplicated these experimental games with the Machiguenga in Peru, a “family-level society”3 that ‘subsist[s] on a combination of † Editors, Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr and Herbert Gintis; published by Oxford University Press; pp 451 plus xiii. ∗ Lecturer in Law, University of the South Pacific. 1 The website for this project, which includes excellent documentation of the research design, is available at http://www.hss.caltech.edu/roots-of-sociality (Accessed 23 June 2008). 2 The homepage of this research network is http://www.umass.edu/preferen/ (Accessed 23 June 2008). The website usefully publishes a number of papers on issues related to the relationship between customary norms and the notion of rational individualism. 3 This anthropological classification is defined as societies that ‘consist of economically independent families that lack any stable governing institutions or organizational decision-making structures beyond the 28 Journal of South Pacific Law (2008) 12(2) hunting, fishing, gathering and manioc swidden-based agriculture’4 and that is only integrated into the cash economy in fairly limited ways. The results of the Machiguenga experiments demonstrated that the culture apparently acted more selfishly, or with less concern for “fairness”, than undergraduate students from western market societies. ‘This result was especially surprising because the Machiguenga live in small villages in which people rarely interact with strangers – an environment in which many of [the network members] thought would lead to more concerns for fairness and reciprocity, not less.’5 This led to the questions, ‘Were the Machiguenga results anomalous in some fashion? Or, were they an indication of some substantial amount of cultural variation lurking outside the student-subject pools of the world’s universities?’6 Out of these questions the Roots of Human Sociality project was established. This project conducted the same experiments in 15 small-scale societies around the world. The Pacific region was included, with two villages in Papua New Guinea, Au and Gnau, being studied. As cross cultural comparison was an important part of the project, data on cultural characteristics were gathered. First, societies were classified using generally accepted anthropological classifications on each society’s economic base, residence, language family and complexity.7 These classifications are of interest to legal researchers in the Pacific who engage in cross-cultural research and are seeking frameworks with which to compare general societal characteristics. At the University of the South Pacific, which has twelve member countries, the teaching of law is necessarily comparative and research is also, often, cross-cultural, so any tools to help strengthen such research are particularly useful and welcome. Project specific classifications on: payoffs to cooperation, or the degree to which well-being depends upon cooperation with non- family members; market integration, or the degree of reliance on the cash economy; anonymity, or the extent to which transactions with strangers occur; privacy, or the degree to which things can be kept secret; sociopolitical complexity, or the extent of centralised decision making above family level that occurs; and settlement size were also used.8 Again these classifications are of potential interest to legal researchers in the Pacific who are examining questions as to why the uptake of the state legal system varies amongst different communities. It is reasonable to hypothesise that societies who are more integrated into the western cash economy would be more likely to use the (western- style) state legal system, or that societies who place more value on cooperation would be family.’ (Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin F. Camerer, Ernest Fehr, Herbert Gintis and Robert McElreath, ‘Overview and Synthesis’ in Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin F. Camerer, Ernest Fehr and Herbert Gintis, Foundations of Human Sociality (2004) 8, 17.) 4 Joseph Henrich and Natalie Smith, ‘Comparative Experimental Evidence from Machiguenga, Mapuche, Huinca and American Populations’ in Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin F. Camerer, Ernest Fehr and Herbert Gintis, Foundations of Human Sociality (2004) 125, 126. 5 Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin F. Camerer, Ernest Fehr and Herbert Gintis, ‘Introduction and Guide to the Volume’ in Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin F. Camerer, Ernest Fehr and Herbert Gintis, Foundations of Human Sociality (2004) 1, 3. 6 Ibid. 7 Joseph Henrich et al, above n 3, 13 – 18. 8 Joseph Henrich et al, above n 3, 28 – 29. 29 Journal of South Pacific Law (2008) 12(2) less likely to use the adversarial legal system,9 and the instruments developed by the Roots of Human Sociality project would be of help in conducting research into such hypotheses.10 Data on the individual characteristics of participants, including education level, age, wealth and gender were also collected. Three different types of experimental games were used: dictator games, ultimatum games and public goods games. In dictator games, which aim to test a “sense of fairness,” one person, the proposer, is given an amount of money, “the pie”, and is asked to share it with a second person, the responder. Both players get to keep their share of the pie. The theory is that “more fair” people will divide the pie equally, whereas “more selfish” people will keep a larger share of the pie for themselves. In ultimatum games, which aim to determine if a fear of rejection will alter offers and the extent to which someone is willing to punish someone else for “unfairness” at their own expense, the proposer divides up the pie, but the responder can choose to either accept or reject the division of the pie. If the division is rejected then neither player gets anything. Two variations of public goods games were played. In the first, the player is given a sum of money and can contribute as much of it as he or she likes to the common pool. Once all players have contributed to the common pool, the pool money is increased by 50% or doubled and then shared equally amongst all players. In the second all money begins in the common pool and players can make limited withdrawals. After withdrawals are made the pool money is again increased and shared equally. These games ‘investigate how people behave when individual and group interests conflict.’11 In these experiments, no one knew who they were paired with, or how much others contributed or withdrew from the common pool. Chapter 3 goes into more detail about the underlying theories of each game and discusses some previous experiments, providing a very accessible introduction to game theory and experimental economics. Chapters 4 to 14 each discuss the conduct of the experiments in the different societies and the results in those societies. These are interesting to read for several reasons. First, each elaborates briefly on the theoretical framework, which helps readers to better understand the methodology material in chapter 3. As the authors come from a variety of disciplines, there are different perspectives on the theoretical framework, which also helps to add depth. Second, each
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